Tijuana-to-Tecate rail tour has been picking up steam

Train excursions stir memories and give businesses a boost

Luisa Prado, 4, stands in the passageway connecting train cars during a tourist ride. The one-day round trips from Tijuana to Tecate, which include a three-hour stop in Tecate, have been drawing several hundred people.
David Maung

Luisa Prado, 4, stands in the passageway connecting train cars during a tourist ride. The one-day round trips from Tijuana to Tecate, which include a three-hour stop in Tecate, have been drawing several hundred people.
David Maung

Sara Garcia, 3, and Sofia Omana, 2, look out a window of a tourist passenger train, which gives one-day round-trip rides from Tijuana to Tecate. David Maung

Sara Garcia, 3, and Sofia Omana, 2, look out a window of a tourist passenger train, which gives one-day round-trip rides from Tijuana to Tecate. David Maung

TECATE  Nostalgia drifts among the 300 passengers aboard this train as it travels from Tijuana to Tecate at 18 mph.

The passengers primarily consist of families from Tijuana, couples with children who only know of train travel from stories told by family members or sepia-toned photographs, mostly of the Mexican Revolution.

That longing is also mixed with a touch of incredulity.

“A lot of people still don’t believe trains can carry passengers,” said Jorge Octavio Monraz, manager of the Tijuana-Tecate Short Railway Administration. The occasional freight train is all that most people see in the city.

“It’s a trip full of many memories” he said. “Adults who remember when they were children and used to go to the Mexicali train station to pick up relatives from Guadalajara or Mexico City.”

Adela Martínez, 37, a Tijuana resident who was a train passengers on a recent day, said she had heard of the tours and was curious about riding in one of the cars.

“My grandmother, who is still alive and is 96 years old, used to tell me when I was a girl that she used to travel from Tecate to Tijuana by train when she needed to go to the doctor or go shopping. I didn’t believe her, that’s why I came, but now that I’m riding in it I feel very emotional,” said Martínez, who was making the trip with one of her three daughters.

According to the railway administration, from Oct. 24, 2009, to Aug. 21 of this year, the Tijuana-Tecate tourist train made 12 trips with a total of almost 4,000 passengers.

The train leaves from the García station in Tijuana, between Simón Bolívar and Díaz Ordaz boulevards, in the Los Pinos neighborhood, and travels 43 miles to reach the Tecate station, on Defensores de Baja California Boulevard in the La Viñita neighborhood, just behind the city’s well known brewery.

“You go from the urban to the rural, the scenery changes suddenly. One moment you’re in the city and then there’s a desert panorama, Valle Redondo, El Carrizo dam, the mountain range and the hills. I think that’s the biggest attraction of this trip,” said Miguel Ángel Torrales, the train operator’s director of marketing.

From the train, passengers saw this recently: children in rural areas smiling and waving; goats and cows foraging for food on hilly farms; a fiesta in a tiny and very poor community where the residents hung colorful balloons from their clothes lines.

The train passes through three steel-arched tunnels and over nine bridges on a trip that takes two hours each way.

The tracks used by the tourist train are part of the San Diego and Arizona Railway that John D. Spreckels started to build in 1908 and finished 11 years later, after an interruption from 1911 to 1913 because of the Mexican Revolution.

In 1970, the Mexican government bought the right of way for the Tijuana-Tecate railway from the American company. In 2000, the federal government assigned the railway to the state government of Baja California for a 50-year period.